Oxford

After sending out a long e-mail yesterday to everyone about Oxford, I don’t feel like recapping it all over again. So I’m going to skim over what was really a very packed week with this list of highlights:
-punting (pushing the boat down the canal with a metal pole)

-Christchurch (service at the Cathedral, standing where John Wesley was ordained, the
“Harry Potter” dining hall, the fireplace that inspired the stretched neck in Alice in Wonderland, the “moving staircase” from Harry Potter)

-Alice’s shop (where the real Alice used to buy sweets, and was the inspiration for the Sheep Shop in Through the Looking-Glass)

The Eagle&Child- pub where C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and the rest of the Inklings met

The Terf- tavern as old as the 1200’s, was the setting in a large part of Jude the Obscure (one of my favorite books), and also the place where President Clinton supposedly “smoked, but never inhaled”

Blackwell’s at Oxford- the largest bookstore in England

-sketches by Leonardo da Vinci

-dinosaurs, mummies, and shrunken heads

-Einstein’s blackboard, preserved with his chalk handwritten equation, from his second lecture on the expansion of the universe

-my first and last martini. Yuck! but I was excited that I looked 18 and didn’t get carded.

-VERY formal dinner for which we all got dressed to the nines…very fun…and another night we had a dance at the university bar

OK, now that that’s said and done, I’ll come back and revisit parts of it later.